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Blink, the browser rendering engine Google summoned into existence after becoming disgruntled with progress on the Apple-led Webkit, has made its debut in Windows and Mac OS, after having made its way to Linux last month.

The engine is embedded in Chrome 28, available now in Chrome's stable channel.

Google revealed plans to create Blink back in April, when it declared that more rendering engines would mean more innovation.

Few swallowed that explanation, as Google has many reasons to direct development of as much of Chrome's innards as it can in order to ensure the browser plays nicely with its myriad services. As we noted at that time, the Chocolate Factory was alread unhappy with some aspects of Webkit. That meant “Chrome never used WebKit in quite the same way that Safari did. For example, Chrome ignored WebKit's JavaScriptCore component in favor of Google's homegrown JavaScript engine, V8. It also handled multiple browser processes in a significantly different way than Safari did.”

Google hinted at “major architectural changes” in Blink, which as a fork of WebKit started with the same code base. Few changes are apparent to users in Chrome 28, which Vulture South used to publish this story without being required to do anything new. The most visible changes are a new notifications centre that runs in the Windows and Chrome OS versions of the browser. Vulture South's Mac-happy office hasn't checked that out, but did spot the rather different-looking error message below that, when we clicked on the 'More' button, produced the full text of Chrome's "ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED" notification.

The update process may not, however, be entirely hassle-free: once we learned of Chrome 28's existence, Chrome 27 reported it could find no updates. A discrete installation of Chrome 28 was therefore necessary to bring you this article. ®